About Me

For someone who teaches mathematics, poetry comes easy. There are so many aspects about myself that are unknown even to me. Poetry is way to explore myself. Where it will lead me, I don't know. I don't want to know. I thrive on the unknown.

Sunday, February 6, 2011

Every Sunday, I aim to share poetry with you which had had some impact on me. I am Calling it Sharing Poetry With You. As I didn't have a button for it and also don't know how to make one, I requested Violet Crush as well as Veens to make one for me. Both were kind enough to do that for me. Here I am posting both the buttons.

Staking fencing along the border of the spring
garden I want suddenly to say something about
this word that means sound and soundlessness
at once. The deafening metal of my hammer strikes
wood, a tuning fork tuning my ears to a register
I’m too deaf to understand. Across the yard

each petal dithers from the far pear one white
cheek at a time like one blade of snow into
the next until the yard looks like the sound
of a television screen tuned last night to late-
night static. White as a page or a field where
I often go to find the promise of evidence of you

or your unit’s safe return. But instead of foot-
prints in the frosted static there’s only late-
turned-early news and the newest image of a war
that can’t be finished or won. And because last
night I turned away from the television’s promise
of you I’m still away. I’ve staked myself

deep to the unrung ground, hammer humming
in my hand, the screen’s aborted stop-time still
turning over in my head: a white twist of rag
pinned in the bloody center of a civilian’s chest,
a sign we know just enough to know it means
surrender, there in the place a falling petal’s heart would be.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The waiting, the longing and also the futilty of a war that no one can win. This poem speaks to me at many levels.